Various Voices reflections

Darren, Bass

Darren, one of our basses reflects on the choir’s recent trip to Bologna as part of the Various Voices festival and how the struggle and fight for equality remains as strong today as it’s ever been.

In June I travelled to Italy, Bologna for a LGBTQ+ choir festival called Various Voices. Imagine over 100 LGBTQ+ choirs from all over the world gathering every 3 years to raise their voices in harmony and sing on the steps of churches, central piazzas, open air spaces in museums and streets across the city and doing major performances in the main Bologna theatres. It was absolutely idyllic, perfect weather, the people of Italy excited to see all of the performances from different choirs singing in different languages, singing in amazing spaces surrounded by beautiful Italian architecture. The festival ran over five days and was a complete success with friendships forged, voices harmonizing and lots of pasta eaten.

After our main performance at Teatro Manzoni, Bologna

And it doesn’t stop there. I’m in the middle of planning a trip to Liverpool with the choir for Liverpool Pride to support and sing with the smaller choirs based in the city at the end of July to further raise LGBTQ+ awareness.

Sometimes I look at the things I get involved in as a gay man in the UK, the freedom of living openly as a gay in London, the LGBTQ+ choir I’m a member of, the various gay sport clubs I belong to, and I think how wonderful, how far we have travelled, how open society is to LGBTQ+ people and then I remember. I remember the hardships, the struggles of coming out, the non-acceptance both publicly and privately, the abuse on the streets, endured both personally and by minority communities, up and down the country for being different, the struggles of the gay black pride movement and the trans community and I realise how far we still must travel.

On stage at Teatro Manzoni, Bologna

These pictures from Italy Various Voices Choir Festival are beautiful, they celebrate and rejoice in all things that bring acceptance, and bring our society together but unfortunately the story is different. Whilst performing the Italian government announced its intention to ban same sex couples from having babies via surrogacy abroad. In Bologna I met an Italian same sex couple who explained the heartache they are feeling because they will be breaking the law and are stopped from fathering children and building a family of their own because of their sexual orientation.

More recently the Italian government ordered city councils to stop registering same sex parents’ children and following that a state prosecutor in Rome demanded the cancellation of 33 birth certificates of children born to lesbian couples dating back to 2017, saying the name of the non-biological mother should be removed. Reuters News Article.

Backstage excitement!

Whilst you look at the pictures and hear the wonderful experience I had in Italy and have as a gay man in the UK and London, remember there is a sliding scale of equality, acceptance and openness that creates laws and regulations that infringe on the civil liberties of the LGBTQ+ community both in the UK and abroad. Whilst being a member of the Pink Singers, I feel surrounded and supported by friends and allies and that permeates into the wider UK society, but we can become complacent as it seems like everything is ok now, and that everybody is afforded the same liberty and freedom as everyone else but that’s not the case and so support, change and activism is still required and we still have a long way to go. 

Darren, Bass

Statement on the Right to Protest

The Pink Singers was founded 40 years ago as an inclusive community choir, a space for marginalised people to come together joined by our love of singing and our solidarity. The music we perform has always been a mixture of popular, classical, and political pieces, and our membership has a diverse range of views. We are however united by the continual struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Our first ever performance was at the 1983 London Lesbian and Gay Pride march and we have been marching, singing and protesting at Pride ever since. Despite the many gains in rights and freedoms achieved  for LGBTQ+ people in the UK over the four decades we have existed, parts of our community continue to be persecuted, harassed, and legislated against. The fight is not over, and our presence at Pride – which is protest – is more necessary than ever. 

It is with dismay therefore that we witnessed last weekend the arrest of peaceful protesters in London during the Coronation, with some people being arrested merely on the suspicion that they were intending to protest. While this was happening a group of Pinkies were representing us at the Coronation Concert at Windsor Castle, performing as part of its ‘people’s choir’ to represent the diversity of the nation. We were asked to represent LGBTQ+ identities at this international event, and accepted as our founding principles are to be visible, out and proud, and if there is a choir that represents inclusive LGBTQ+ community in the UK, then it is the Pink Singers. But we cannot stand idly by while anti-protest legislation is forced upon us. 

Protest has played, and continues to play, an integral part in the LGBTQ+ community’s fight for our rights. From Stonewall in the US to Section 28 here in the UK, protest has formed the cornerstone of activism and has done much to progress the rights of LGBTQ+ people across the world. The arrests during the coronation weekend set a dangerous precedent regarding the right to protest in the UK that is incompatible with the needs of the LGBTQ+ community.

While these changes affect us all, trans, migrant and racialised communities are disproportionately affected by hostile anti-protest legislation. Any withdrawal of the right to protest follows reasoning that increased state power keeps us safe, even as we know that this is not the case for LGBTQ+ people of colour, LGBTQ+ migrants, and most trans people. The Coronation Choir sang the song ‘Brighter Days’ to reflect rising hope in the UK after the recovery from COVID-19, but with the recent and growing threat of legislative changes against trans people proposed by the UK’s own Equality and Human Rights Commission – widely condemned by UK LGBTQ+ charities, by a representative of the United Nations and reflected in the UK’s ongoing fall in the ILGA Europe LGBTQ+ rights rankings – we may yet see even darker days, and protesting these threats against our community is more important than ever.

In 2021 we took the decision to pause our participation in the Pride in London march while they addressed issues of systemic racism within the organisation. However this pause did not mean we stopped marching, and we have been taking our message of joy, inclusion, solidarity and protest to many other marches including London Trans Pride as well as Kyiv-Warsaw Pride in Poland. Since the events of last weekend the police have expressed ‘regret’ over the protesters’ arrests, but we cannot rest on our laurels. Making music is what we love and what brings us together, but we are also a family – a chosen family – and we need to take care of each other. This year we will be out together marching proud and singing in London, Liverpool, Northampton, Bologna and elsewhere standing up for our family and for what we believe in. We hope to see you there.

Proud to think pink: The Pink Singers at 40

This article, published in our last concert programme, was co-written by Hsien Chew and Chris Scales from our Archive and Communities teams to reflect on 40 years of the choir’s history of music-making and activism:

Brian Kennedy, our founder

Brian Kennedy would have been proud: 40 years is, by any measure, an achievement. In the early eighties Brian led efforts to build inclusive community spaces for LGBTQ+ people in London, including the ground-breaking London Lesbian and Gay Centre. He also had a vision to create a community choir, the first mixed lesbian and gay choir in Europe. On 7th April 1983, 29 people showed up to our very first rehearsal at the Oval House in Kennington. The press reported that the new choir members were equally divided between wanting to sing ‘political’, ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ music. This captures what the choir has always been about: a powerful combination of music-making and LGBTQ+ activism. The balance of celebration and politics – enjoying ourselves while standing up for what we believe in – is something that defines us to this day.

Having brought together a bunch of intrepid singers, we had to come up with a name, and the members decided on The Pink Singers; not pink to make the boys wink, but pink as in gay rights. Pink was the colour of the badges enforced on homosexual prisoners in the nazi concentration camps, and the pink triangle became a rallying symbol for the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s, along with the Labrys doubleaxe and many others, long before Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag became popular in the UK. Today we march under multiple banners and our representation grows more inclusive each year, but we have stuck with our name as a unifying term that remembers Brian’s inclusive vision for our community. Not to mention “the Pink Singers” stuck because we were out and loud!

Section 28 protest, May 2000

Although a London-based choir, the Pink Singers have always been international in our politics and reach. Our first musical director Mark Bunyan was persuaded to lead the choir by author Armistead Maupin, a central figure in founding the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, and at our first rehearsal we listened to recordings of the Australian Gay Liberation Choir and Portland Gay Men’s Choir for inspiration. Over the following decades we have travelled all over Europe and the world, taking part in festivals and marching in solidarity with our international siblings. In our time the Pink Singers have marched and sung on countless platforms from the main stage at Pride to protests outside the Houses of Parliament. We have added our voices to the path of a more equitable world, from the equalization of the age of consent, to the removal of the evil Section 28, to the introduction of civil partnerships and marriage equality.

Society has also changed around us and, superficially at least, it seems that acceptance of this plurality is now upon us. Our understanding, however, of our shared humanity, of the diversity of our sexual orientation and our gender identities and expression has also broadened and deepened; many members of our community are being left behind. Bi visibility and trans rights, for instance, have become an ever increasing focus for the choir. In addition, we are more aware of the concept of intersectionality and how attributes such as race, age, gender and disability can compound the experiences of those within an already marginalized community.

Cass and Philip interviewed by Vic Parsons at Trans Pride London, 2022

It is a gradual and ongoing process, but the Pink Singers increasingly reflects this plurality in its makeup. Despite the LGBT+ umbrella term, this diversity is a surprising rarity in our community which has a tendency to segmentation. The Pink Singers takes great pride in being a mixed sexuality, mixed gender, multicultural, inter-generational space, but, even with the love of music and performance bringing us together, fostering unity requires constant vigilance.

We initially feared that the pandemic would be an existential crisis for the choir, but, reassuringly, the Pinkies valued our community even more when its loss seemed imminent. We used the enforced break from singing to gather online and reflect on how we could stand better together. Black Lives Matter, for instance, made us rethink our approach to racial diversity, and we have made foundational changes to how the choir works, from membership to music selection, in order to ensure all minority voices are heard. We also used the opportunity to tell each other stories of our own experiences. This has enriched our understanding of each other, from personal histories of the AIDS crisis and the loss of loved ones, to finding a new chosen family in the ballroom scene of Manchester, to LGBT+ education in schools and how LGBT+ and religious identities coexist. Many of these conversations are available on our YouTube channel.

The empathy we have for each other has also made us conscious of the privileges we have here in the UK compared to our LGBT+ family elsewhere across the world. In 2017, we collaborated with Rainbow Voices Mumbai, a choir based in India, to highlight the injustice of colonial era laws criminalizing homosexuality which persisted there, despite having been repealed in England half a century prior. We jointly ran an educational programme for our members, to learn about the challenges facing the LGBT+ communities in both countries, and sang in concerts and marched in Prides in Mumbai and London to show solidarity with each other. To much shared celebration, India decriminalised homosexuality in 2019. This year sees the first challenges in court to legalise marriage equality there.

Pinkies and Rainbow Voices at Mumbai Pride, 2017

Over the pandemic we also worked with LGBT+ choirs in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, where our seminars covered topics as diverse as the antigay purge in Chechnya, the LGBT free zones in Poland and conversion therapy in the U.K., as well as our shared joy of singing. This culminated in the Pink Singers travelling to Warsaw last year to perform with Chor Voces Gaudii and march at Warsaw Pride. We were joined by half the members of Queer Essence choir who sought refuge in Poland in the wake of the war in Ukraine, the other half remaining in Kharkiv to defend their city. Our demonstration of solidarity meant a lot to all of us.

Sadly, our founder Brian Kennedy passed away in 1990 and never got to see the fruits of the seed that he planted. Could he have imagined that the people who gathered that afternoon in 1983 would blossom into a family of over 100 singers on stage today, representing a community of thousands of Pink Singers through the years and across the globe? We think he would be so proud.

Hsien & Chris

Concert: Our 40 Year Story!

Saturday 15th July 2023 – Cadogan Hall, 5 Sloane Terrace, London SW1X 9DQ

Join us on a breath-taking musical journey spanning continents, cultures, and major events in LGBT+ history. Back again at Cadogan Hall, the choir is celebrating our 40th anniversary and bringing back a variety of timeless hits from our repertoire. This two-hour concert is absolutely jam-packed full of synth-fuelled 80’s punk, 90’s power ballads and some of the biggest hits from the 2000’s, many of which are arranged by choir members. We’ll also be treated to a visual montage of Pink Singers’ 40 Year Journey, exploring remarkable events in which the choir supported LGBT+ communities around the world.

Expect a moving revival of Pinkies anthems from past and present. 

“It was a wonderfully exuberant and engaging evening….All were given with theatrical pizazz which left everyone wanting more. ” Planet Hugill

Tickets start at £10. Don’t forget, you can secure a VIP ticket including a free glass of champagne from £45. Try to book in advance – this concert is likely to sell out as we did in April!

The Coronation Choir!

Pink Singers to perform as part of the Coronation Choir

Members of the Pink Singers, Europe’s oldest mixed LGBTQ+ choir, will make up 22 of the 300-strong ensemble of singers performing at the Coronation Concert this weekend. 

The Coronation Choir will bring together singing groups of all shapes and sizes from across the four corners of Britain. The choirs performing are from a range of diverse backgrounds and include an all-deaf sign performance organisation, a traditional male voice choir from Caerphilly, Yorkshire’s only female South Asian choir, the London Fire Brigade and a sea shanty troupe of RNLI volunteers. 

The groups will be led by coaches Amanda Holden, Motsi Mabuse and Rose Ayling-Ellis, joined by choirmaster Gareth Malone to prepare the choir for the Windsor Castle event.

Zoe Johannes, the Pink Singers’ Events Manager and a soprano in the choir, spoke about our involvement:

“At the last coronation in 1953 being LGBT was illegal, and it is a significant sign of how much times have changed that the Royal family has gone out of their way to say that they want to include LGBTQ+ people in the concert. That visibility is so important. We wanted to be there for that reason to show the country that we’re out here and we’re proud.”

“There’s a big diversity in our group and where people have chosen to participate it is for a variety of different reasons, but one common feeling is wanting to send a message of inclusion to those watching the event in the UK and around the World.”

In this, our 40th anniversary year, we are proud that we’re able to openly represent the diversity and brilliance of LGBTQ+ people on an international stage through singing. 

The journey of the Coronation Choir will be charted in a documentary screening on BBC1 this Friday 5th May at 8pm, and the performance will be shown live during the concert taking place on Sunday 7th May at 8pm. Both programmes can also be watched on the BBC iPlayer, through the links below.

Sing for the King, The Search for the Coronation Choir: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lmq2

The Coronation Concert: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lt2m